AMD Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 Overclocked Round-up
Test System and 3DMark Vantage
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: In order to provide comparable results, the graphics cards featured here were installed on the same, high end X58 based test system. The components used consisted of the Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard, Core i7 980X Extreme Edition processor, and 6GB of OCZ Blade memory.
Within the BIOS, we configured the processor to an overclocked speed of 4.27GHz and memory to 1869MHz. We feel these settings will minimize the occurrences of non-GPU related performance bottlenecks during benchmark runs and allow the graphics cards to show their true potential. Furthermore, our Crucial M225 solid state drive entered the testing process with a clean copy of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit installed. Once installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest drivers and applications relevant to the review article.
|
|
|
|
Hardware Used: 6GB OCZ Blade DDR3-1869 |
Display: |
In order to find out where these cards fit in the graphics market, we put them up against some serious competition. The comparison group consists of four other models: Gigabyte's Super Overclock HD 5870, Super Overclock GTX 470, MSI's Hawk GTX 460, and a stock XFX HD 6870. We adjusted to the GPU and memory speeds of the SOC HD 5870 to match stock settings.
|
|
|
|
|
The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. |
As you might expect, the 6870's are faster than the GTX 460, but still trail the 5870 and GTX 470 in 3DMark Vantage. On the other hand, the HD 6850 PCS+ comes up behind the stock HD 6870 by a wide margin.
